Integration Alliance names new president

Integration Alliance names new president

Key US 3000 distributor focuses on response to master growth spurt

Integration Alliance Corp. (IAC), one of only two US-based distributors of HP 3000 systems, peripherals and solutions, has announced that David Schunk is its new president.

Schunk first joined IAC in the spring as Chief Financial Officer. He took his new post from CEO Bruce Smith and VP of operations Christopher Joseph, who were sharing the duties of president along with Schunk.

Smith, one of the founders of the distributor that provides HP hardware and integration services to HP 3000 resellers, steps away from day-to-day operations with the move but remains in a planning capacity as CEO. Co-founder Joseph remains as VP of operations, as do co-founder Ross Duncan, now VP of services and software; VP of marketing Virginia Livingston; director of procurement Nancy Irish; and Herb Guck, acting VP of logistics.

Schunk came to IAC from Intelligent Electronics (IE), a multi-billion dollar distributor which became part of the Ingram Micro empire during the past year. The new president said that the reorganization is meant to help IAC better service its resellers with fundamentals.

One of four executives who joined IAC from IE this year, Schunk said the executive IE experience will offer some benefits for the HP 3000 business that IAC conducts.

“It brings a fundamental distribution knowledge, how to deal with and respond to customers and deal with them in real time,” he said. “I think that’s something we needed to work on here at IAC. Customers on the 3000 side will get a much more responsive organization that, in addition to its value-added and quoting capabilities and its knowledge of the product, will now get those ‘Maslow’s Hierarchies’ needs of basic response – things maybe IAC has been a little deficient in over the past 12 months.”

If IAC needed to improve its response time to resellers, the fastest-growing distributor in HP’s stable might be forgiven considering the expansion it has been handling. Earlier this year the company opened a separate 32,000-square foot Integration Center, custom-built for assembling HP business computer systems. IAC officials say the center is the largest non-HP-owned facility of its type in the world, and its design allows IAC to configure up to 50 HP commercial systems concurrently, regardless of class or size.


	“We’re expecting a spike in our 3000 volume over the next six to nine months,” Schunk said, “mostly based on the general transition of HP-direct business over to the channel. The 3000 is a key foundation piece of our strategy.”

In March the company expanded its headquarters to a 26,000-square foot space in the Denver Technological Center. Those moves were less than six months after the distributor received full authorization for the entire HP business server line, gaining the capability to provide resellers with HP 9000 and HP NetServer systems in addition to the HP 3000 business which launched IAC three years ago.

Schunk said the company has been managing growth of 50 percent per quarter during the past two quarters, bolstered by the addition of the other HP business server lines. He’s anticipating even more, sparked by a surge in HP 3000 business in the coming year.

“We’re expecting a spike in our 3000 volume over the next six to nine months,” he said, “mostly based on the general transition of HP-direct business over to the channel. The 3000 is a key foundation piece of our strategy. It’s like what Yogi Berra said – it’s exactly where they ain’t, and that’s where we need to be,” meaning the strategy recognizes both the 3000’s unique advantages and IAC’s potential to help new resellers offer the solution. IAC built the Integration Center in anticipation of this transition, as HP continues to move its direct 3000 customers into the waters of resellers, who are the customers IAC serves.

“The CSY group is asking us to take our customer care to the next level,” Schunk said. “We’ve asked them to step up marketing and visibility, and we’ll do what we do best, which is taking care of the customer.”

Schunk said the most important things CSY has committed to are “providing funding for customer pull programs, focusing on the Year 2000 problem and how the HP 3000 and IAC can be part of the solution.”